2 The Literature of Character.
II THE LITERATURE OF CHARACTER No epoch heretofore has appreciated so highly as our own the art of character-drawing. The merit which the Romantic school attributed to the invention, most illusory after all, of subjects and "situations," the Realist school has since transferred to the invention, the "creation," to use the current word, of characters. These, extracted from surrounding life by means of a mysterious chemistry, then condensed by skilful syntheses, should illustrate social studies in brilliant genre-pictures, in the way in which "Romantic" plots have been credited with embodying those reconstitutions of history recently promoted to the dignity of a "new science." In emulation, we have come, on our side, to reserve the title of "creative genius" for the author of a great number of well-defined characters ; this is the reason for the special veneration we profess for Homer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac and Zola (the latter nevertheless so weak and so little varied in his drawings of women). The classic writers, indeed, did not think as we do. Even the fathers of the drama and of modern realism refused any pre-eminence of psychology. "It is for the situations" declares Diderot positively, "to decide the characters. The plan of a drama may be drawn, and well drawn, before the poet knows anything of the character he will give to his personages." And Beaumarchais acknowledged, for his part, that the choice of characters was, in his plays, determined by the necessities of the plot. These revolutionaries thus confirm, in their modesty and sincerity, the enormous experience condensed in the Aristotelian "Poetics." "Action is the object of tragedy. . . Without action there can be no tragedy. There may be one without morals. . . To develop a moral is not to create a tragedy," etc. Besides, the founders of realism gave themselves no illusions as to the small number of characters. The same Diderot, after Voltaire, could discover albeit with a somewhat superficial look only a dozen more or less, he assures us. (For in those happy days of "elegant" literature, one did not pass for a chimerical soul, an occultist, if one ventured to introduce into the prevailing mental confusion the luminous precision of arithmetic.) The classic authors? They ingenuously demanded from legend and tradition not only the stories, but the heroes ready-made. They borrowed them and bequeathed them to one another with the generosity of indifference, the merit consisting far more, in their eyes, in a presentation, a perspective which brought in evidence some aspect until then imperfectly seen, and above all, in another and better harmony of composition shown throughout the entire work, even to its humblest details. They well knew, these great originals, that one does not create new characters, only situations, plots, or symbols. If I have been able to reduce to about thirty-six -the figure given by Gozzi, Goethe and Schiller the number of Dramatic Situations, it should be still easier to show exactly the limited number of creatures who compose our swarming humanity. However, such a simplification is much less the object of the present inquiry since it would increase the actual poverty than is the remedying of that poverty by drawing from precisely this simplification a method for multiplying elements in infinite combinations. I shall give but the method ; it will convince only those minds desirous of applying it. But I shall furnish successively tangible and living results in a multitude of figures exactly 12,915 which are admittedly unpublished and newly characterized. Let them hasten and group themselves, to satisfy first of all that desire for "new characters" which torments thee, O contemporary reader! How symptomatic it is, this desire! Perhaps it tends to found a form of literature which shall be chiefly devoted to the representation of character. For it must be recognized, despite what we hear repeated and re-echoed, such a form has never yet existed. The theatre? By virtue of its visual destination and its gestures, it is obviously better suited to the representation of action than of character or even morals. Comedy itself, although its less ominous gestures have a less hypnotizing effect, has flourished, and widely, before this learned character-drawing was thought of, and its merriest form, and consequently the most personal, has continued to live, and prospers more than ever, in opposition to the comedy of character once conceived by Menander. The latter has never constituted more than a special branch, precisely that whose incessantly but vainly renewed springs (romantic substitutions, the call of the blood, theses, etc.) grate the more at each turn of the action, and characters superpose themselves in unpleasant fashion, as a superb but misplaced display, upon the supple steel of comic plot, which remains the indispensable, the essential. The novel? Besides its formless aspect, since it no longer follows the outlines of the epic, fiction has always, by virtue of its redundancy of wordy detail, better presented morals than characters. To these the epic, the novel of more vigorous ages, assuredly offers a place which, albeit secondary, is yet broader. The epic, in short, approximates the story which offers, in a conventional and abstract light, its "portraits" from which we need only remove the proper names and dates to make of them but general sketches, worthy of being signed by La Bruydre. He thought to continue Theophrastus. But, instead of a Menander, he produced but a Des touches. Not that he has, in reality, augmented the catalog of his predecessor ; far from it ! He has, notably, enriched to excess all that concerns worldly vanity, which passion alone fills more than four-fifths of his book, so surprisingly meager otherwise, as to violence (one example), lust (almost nothing), ingenuity, etc. The list of his characters represents but the merest fraction of our psychological world-map. To complete it we must resume the plan, much more comprehensive, simpler and more profound, of the great Theophrastus. He commenced, it is said, at the age of ninety-nine years, his admirable book, the result not only of a philosophic system (derived from Aristotle) but of a century of personal observation. From it, indeed, we may see spring, fully armed, the New Comedy. The plays of Menander are unfortunately almost entirely destroyed, and, despite the fragments recently recovered, the secrets of creation which their ensemble would have imparted to us, by comparison with the book of Theophrastus, can be obtained only in a slight degree by following the figurines of La Bruyere in the Comedy of Character of the eighteenth century, trivially argumentative, narrow and automatic. It may likewise be interesting to infer what the Homme de Cour promised by Moliere as his CHEF D'OEUVRE would have been, in contemplating his famous "portraits" of the Misanthrope. Moreover, the maker of "portraits" precedes, in literary history, but secondary comedy, the comedy of character, and, coming always after tragedy, already overflowing with varied and powerful characters, he does not sufficiently explain to us the genesis of these. And before them we find the true Moralists. The Gnomics and Pythagoras usher in the Greek theater. A Montaigne and a Thomas Aquinas by the Council of Trent influence Shakespeare, and Rochefoucauld, Charron, Nicole, Pascal, find themselves again upon the stage, comic or tragic, of the seventeenth century in its second half, like the imperious Ignatius Loyola in Corneille. How does this transfer take place? We see it operate in the bosom of a family, and perhaps simply of a man, with Seneca or the Senecas. The better yet to follow it, let us take Plutarch; a moralist, does he not detail to us, bit by bit, in sage reflections, even in anecdotes, each of the characters which he has during his life studied or imagined (which is the same thing)? See him arrange before us, with his famous parallel biographies, Caesar-Alexander or the Ambitious, Cicero-Demosthenes or the Liberal Orator, Demetrius-Antony or the Voluptuous Commander, Aristides-Cato or the Earnest Thinker, etc. And, as for portraits, all history subsequently will proceed from him; a Janssen, a Taine, a Mommsen clearly work in the same way. This machine, built wheel by wheel, sentence by sentence, by the Moralist, and elevated by the Historian, the Dramatic Author, laying his analysis back in its box, has but to set in motion. The man anatomically studied, then defined, drawn and reconstructed, he has but to make move before our eyes, and behold! a new character upon the stage. Shakespeare and Corneille have not done otherwise.